Welcome to House With No Name. I write about everything from books and films to education, family and France.
Working from home is a double-edged sword. I can start work when I want, wear what I please, chat to my son when he gets in from school and fix coffee with friends without a clock-watching news editor yelling at me for being late back. All good, but I still hanker after office life – the gossip, the banter, the buzz. The best place I ever worked was the Evening ...keep reading
Revision fever is rife at House with No Name towers. With two teenagers working towards exams, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Desperate to help (something they don’t want at all!), I appealed for advice on Twitter. Answers came back thick and fast, ranging from “nag them about tidying their rooms – they’ll prefer to revise” to “don’t insist that they can revise continuously – build in plenty ...keep reading
Amazingly, it’s nearly 30 years since Barbara Trapido’s first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, was published to huge acclaim. Since then she’s produced just six more. But trust me, her latest, Sex and Stravinsky, is well worth the wait. At first glance, Oxford headteacher Caroline Silver is one of those annoying women who’s clever, beautiful and selfless. She’s an amazing cook, makes her own clothes (for goodness sake!) ...keep reading
I’m so excited. Five years after I bought the House with No Name, the first phase of the renovation is almost complete and we’ll be staying there this summer. Our architect and builder friends have worked miracles, keeping its character while transforming it into a place of charm. Lots of readers have asked how I came to buy it in the first place so I’ve gone back to my old ...keep reading
I’ve loved Jilly Cooper’s books since I was a teenager. Emily, her very first novel, started life as a serial called Circles that she wrote for 19 magazine. She later completely rewrote it, and like every other reader I was hooked from the memorable first line – “If Nina hadn’t bugged me, I’d never have gone to Annie Richmond’s party.” And if that hadn’t happened, as you’ll no doubt remember, ...keep reading
From The Times’s wrap-around picture of the newly-weds in Prince Charles’s dashing sports car to the Daily Telegraph’s shot of the first (or was it second) balcony kiss, the newspapers did us proud today. I’m not sure what the Independent was playing at with Tracey Emin’s dreadful sketch of the bride and groom on its front page but we’ll gloss over that one. Newspapers come in for an awful lot ...keep reading
Sitting in Oxford, with the number 7 bus trundling past and Marks & Spencer just up the road, I sometimes think the house with no name must be a figment of my imagination. Am I going to wake up one day and discover that the tumbledown French farmhouse that inspired this blog was just a dream? Definitely not. It all looked splendidly real when we sat in the courtyard in ...keep reading
Slowly, slowly, the French farmhouse I bought on a mad whim back in 2006 is coming back to life. My husband and children always promised it would but, being a wimp, I had my doubts. We still haven’t managed to sleep a night there yet, but the tumbledown six-bedroom wreck with half a roof, terrible damp problem and bathroom inhabited by a plague of rats is looking – and I ...keep reading
My must-see TV of the week is Channel 4’s Jamie’s Dream School – the series where Jamie Oliver gets a host of celebrities to teach 20 tricky teenagers who’ve left school with barely any qualifications. The science teacher is fertility expert Lord Winston (who’s already hit the headlines for getting the boys in the class to study their own sperm). History is taught by Dr David Starkey, politics by spin ...keep reading
“If you’re after a brilliantly-written love story that never slides into sentimentality, David Nicholls’s One Day is just the ticket. Nicholls trained as an actor before switching to writing – his first novel, Starter for Ten, was made into a film starring James McAvoy and Rebecca Hall and he wrote the recent TV adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. His third novel is a funny ‘“will they, won’t they?’” romance ...keep reading